Angry Corner

Al-Akhbar is currently going through a transitional phase whereby the English website is available for Archival purposes only. All new content will be published in Arabic on the main website (www.al-akhbar.com).

It is said in Arabic: take their secrets from their minors, and we can also take the administration’s secrets from its minors, i.e., Joe Biden. Joe Biden is infamous for not being smart, and is well known for bombast, buffoonery, and plagiarism. But Biden can also, due to lack of judgment and mental restraint, reveal what Obama wishes to conceal. Obama is quite adept at concealing his intentions and even his policies (and wars) when it is politically convenient. Biden is less skilled in concealment and for that he is rarely assigned important tasks of policy. One wonders whether Biden is even privy to the secrets of the administration.

It is the season of the revival of the “Arab Mind”: propagandists for Saudi princes around the world are peddling the same message contained in the racist book, The Arab Mind. Propagandists of Saudi princes who write in English have another task: they are competing to inherit the role of Fouad Ajami in Zionist US media. They know how much American mainstream media and Israel appreciate the schtick that Arabs are responsible for their misery, or that, as Ajami put it over and over again in his cliché, Arab wounds are self-inflicted. Saudi Arabia decided on orders of the US to take on ISIS and the Saudi regime may also have its own fears from ISIS. But the propaganda outlets of Saudi regime act and sound in unison, claiming that the Saudi regime is blameless, and that the US and Israel are humanitarian warriors in the Arab world, and that Arabs are backward by their very nature. To blame the US or Israel for Arab wars and divisions is tantamount to blasphemy in the Wahhabi doctrine.

The Syrian war is not only a proxy war. There is a strong internal dimension to the war in Syria but it has been obscured by various layers and dimensions of outside intervention and agendas. The Syrian regime wants to stay in power at any cost while there was certainly a civil popular opposition in Syria when the uprising first began. There are thousands of reasons for the Syrian people to protest against a family dictatorship that has controlled much of their lives since 1970 but the civil protest movement did not erupt by itself, the Western media narrative notwithstanding.

Western media are aghast: why can’t “Islam” condemn the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and expel it from “Islam.” For Western media, Islam is an office with fancy headquarters where bureaucrats produce fatwas around the clock. In the wake of September 11, Senator Dianne Feinstein used to tour the TV news shows and wonder in anger: why can’t Islam issue a fatwa to end all terrorism? If only things were that easy.

Yet another global war was announced by the US. The US has not really ever taken a break from declaring global wars since the end of World War II. Its war on communism was more than that: it was a global war on feminism, secularism, socialism, and even liberalism around the world. It was a war for the imposition of a right-wing reactionary order in developing countries, and for the forceful and undemocratic prevention of free elections in Western Europe. We now know that the US used its financial wherewithal and dirty tricks to prevent the electoral victory of socialists and communists.

There is a fervent Saudi attempt to isolate the phenomenon of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and to regard it as a phenomenon unrelated to elements in contemporary Arab political culture (or to American foreign policy legacy, for that matter).

Usually one speaks comically of the Arab lobby in Washington, D.C.. Since the oil boom in the 1970s, various Arab-American businesspeople and crooks traveled to the Middle East offering their services to Gulf regimes and promising—in return for large sums of money—to launch an Arab lobby in Washington, D.C.. Those personalities explained that what the “Arab cause”—there was a talk about that back then—only needed money, and once it becomes available in Washington, D.C. the Israeli case would be immediately defeated. Many of those Arab crooks advanced anti-Semitic scenarios about the nature of American politics, and the Saudi political elite loved those scenarios, as does [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas. They believed that a small elite runs US foreign policy in the region.

What is galling about liberal Zionists in the US is that they insist on having it both ways; they want to support Israeli occupation, racism, and wars and yet they want to be perceived as liberals who strive for peace and equality. But Alan Dershowitz in his documentary, “The Case For Israel,” goes farther: he thinks that he has discovered a trick by which he can reconcile his support for racist and war-mongering Israel and his alleged liberalism. He calls himself nowadays “pro-Palestine,” and that verbal declaration – he thinks – can then compensate for his support for Israel’s wars and inequality.

The tweets of US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power deserve to be added to the speeches of George W. Bush as examples of rhetoric-in-the-service-of-an-empire. Her statements give the impression that the US is a charitable organization desperately looking for colored people to save around the world. The distinctions between Obama and Bush were only great in the minds of those liberals who projected so much of their dreams and aspirations on the campaign of Obama in 2008. By 2012, it was was clear that Obama was following in the footsteps of his predecessor with less fanfare.

There is a popular graphic doing the rounds on Arab social media these days; it shows the evolution of weapons used by the Palestinian Resistance, from rocks and pebbles all the way to missiles and drones. This captures the story of the evolution of resistance methods against Israeli occupation.